Converting a Physical Server (or Virtual Server) to Oracle VM (or Xen)

I needed to move some physical Windows 2003 servers.  The site I wanted to move these servers to already had a substantial Oracle VM Server environment that I had built up.  Oracle VM is based off of Xen.  Using Oracle's P2V whitepaper led me to a converted virtual machine that would not boot.  After much searching I found a process that worked for me.  Pulling from different areas on the web the process I came up with is this.

Note:  This process works for Physical servers or Virtual servers (Example:  VMWare).

   1. On the server you wish to convert you need to do some prep work.  You'll need to make sure the server has ide device drivers available and the registry needs to be made aware.  Believe it or not Microsoft has a KB article that details what we need to do.  The section of this KB article we need is under the heading "More Information".  The article can be found here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082
   2. In summary you need to extract the Atapi.sys, Intelide.sys, Pciide.sys, and Pciidex.sys files from the %SystemRoot%\Driver Cache\I386\Driver.cab file and copy the files to the %SystemRoot%\System32\Drivers folder and then copy the registry section to a file (Example: mergeide.reg) and merge the file in to the registry.
   3. Use the free VMWare converter tool to convert the Physical machine to a vmdk file.  If you are doing this on a server (HP or Dell for example) make sure you unselect any management partitions.
   4. Copy this vmdk file to your Oracle VM (or Xen) Server and run the following command:  # qemu-img convert (filename).vmdk (filename).img
   5. Then create a Windows 2003 guest VM (or which ever the OS is of the box you are converting) and make sure it is shutdown.
   6. Remove the img file for the guest you just created and replace it with the one you created in step 4.  Make sure you rename your new image file to the same name as the one you removed in the beginning of step 6.
   7. The guest VM should boot up.  Once your image is up, remove any VMWare tools or conversion programs and remove any Vendor specific management programs (example HP or Dell utilities).


Done.  This process worked for me.  Hope it will help you too.

Linux Authentication Integration with Active Directory

Note:  Since I originally posted this, Likewise Open came out with version 6.  The instructions below work for version 5.3 and 5.4.

I manage a few dozen Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) servers. The timeline to implement these servers and bring them in to production was extremely short. I wanted to have these servers integrated with Active Directory for user authentication. We didn’t have the time to implement any of Oracle's Single Sign On solutions. I also didn’t have the time to properly setup LDAP/WinBind/Samba, so I opted to create a user setup script which would insure the UID would be the same on all the servers. The script worked great. User setup was a snap. The downside was passwords. I set everyone’s password to a default password and set it to expire immediately. Once a user would log in, they would be prompted to change their password. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but there are close to 40 servers that a user would need to do this on. Not ideal for a long term solution.

So, now that these servers are running in production, I needed to go back and implement a better way to manage user accounts in Linux.

I needed to test my implementation on a non-production server. I installed VirtualBox on my Windows 7 PC and installed OEL as a virtual machine. Perfect. Now I have a box I can break without affecting anyone else.

Next, I did some reading on various ways to authenticate Active Directory accounts on a Linux server. I found a Microsoft TechNet article that looked promising. From what I read, LDAP and LADP/Kerberos were probably not the best solutions. The author suggested Winbind. The article walked me through the steps. I was able to join the server to the domain. Wow, that was pretty easy. Now the true test; logging in. I could not log in to the server from the GUI. I could, however, SSH to the server and log in as my Active Directory persona. I checked log files, tried a couple dozen different things and got nowhere. Maybe the fix was easy and I just missed it. In either case, after spending about two (work) days trying to get it to work, I needed to find a different/easier solution.

Enter LikeWise Open.

Right from their website, LikeWise Open
• Joins non-Windows systems to Active Directory domains in a single step from the command line or from a GUI
• Authenticates users with a single user name and password on both Windows and non-Windows
• Enforces the same password policies for non-Windows users and Windows users
• Supports multiple forests with one-way and two-way cross forest trusts
• Caches credentials in case your domain controller goes down
• Provides single sign-on for SSH and Putty
• Next-generation authentication engine that supports Kerberos, NTLM, and SPNEGO
• No schema changes to Active Directory required

Instructions for install:
1. Download the installer package and make it executable.
2. Double click the package and install.
3. Join the server to the AD domain (/opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli join domainName joinAccount).
4. Reboot
5. Login as an AD user (domain\username) from GUI or (domain\\username) from the command line or SSH.

Yes. It was that easy. It worked.

I wanted to make sure that a specific Active Directory group had “sudo” privileges, so I (as root) ran visudo to edit the sudoers file. The line added looked like this.
%MYDOMAIN\\Info^Services ALL=(ALL) ALL

If your group name has a space in it use the ^ charterer in place of a space.
Example: Info Services would be Info^Services
Note the double \ or \\. On the command line “\” is interpreted as an escape charterer so you need two of them.

I tried to sudo as me and it worked!

I change the group on a directory to an Active Directory group.
Example: # chgrp MYDOMAIN\\Info^Services /tmp/testdir

Then I did a: # ls -l /tmp

There it was. The group on the directory was MyDomain\Info^Services

Slick.

I still need to do a little research to make sure this solution meets my security requirements, but so far I am impressed.

P.S. In no way am I associated with the company LikeWise. I like the solution and thought others may too.